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Topic: Browser situation (Read 980 times)

I'm sorry I don't post often here, but I'd like to raise an important topic: the browser situation.

Mozilla is getting rid of lots of legacy code that existed to facilitate portability to different platforms. You've probably heard of Cameron Kaiser, who ports Firefox to PowerPC Macs. He has already mentioned that one of the latest and soon to be mandatory core features won't be portable.

Chrome has never been built for a PowerPC target. I'm not sure if Chromium works. Iceweasel on Debian Wheezy is outdated. I'm not sure about Jessie, how far behind it is.

Roberto and team, how's the situation? The Web evolves around browsers. The newest browsers should, in theory, compile fine and with all the features in the newest platforms. Does anyone have any experience or further information? Am I overreacting or saying something completely stupid?

As far as I know, OWB is quite modern, but Timberwolf is outdated. It's not in active development anymore, even though they have a small handful of part-time developers, it doesn't seem like much work has been done.

The maintainer and developer of TenFourFox is apparently a fantastic person, I guess contacting him for clarification wouldn't be a bad thing.

But as far as I know, he does all of his TenFourFox work in XCode, and he leverages Mac OS-only APIs like Core Text and Core Image. I'm not sure how portable that code is.

His main working OS is to this day OS X 10.4.

Ah okay. Yes, of course. Does make sense. Long time ago I read, that Google has a PowerPC version of android. Maybe Chromium for PowerPC is the solution? IBM is using Ubuntu on POWER8. Do they also use a browser?

Ah okay. Yes, of course. Does make sense. Long time ago I read, that Google has a PowerPC version of android. Maybe Chromium for PowerPC is the solution? IBM is using Ubuntu on POWER8. Do they also use a browser?

There is also OWB for MorphOS built on webkit, I'm not sure how good it actually is compared to TenFourFox. but it could be an option.

There is also Timberwolf for AOS4 but I'm quite sure its quite outdated.

I can send you HTML5 test scores for different browsers on PPC (AmigaOne x1000 OS 4.1FE and Debian Wheezy). In my own experience

a) On Amiga side Odyssey is far better and modern then OWB and TW (TW has never been finished, and I love to read announcement that stands still that it will be updated to FF19 http://friedenhq.org/amiga/timberwolf/ )

b) On Linux side IceWeasel, Firefox and MIDORI do exist, beside KDE browser wich is Amiga style antiquitated by now. IceWeasel and FF are en par but FF tends to be a bit slow, so I find Midori very usable.

On UbuntuMATE which is updated, its possible to run Firefox 52

Yes, on none Javascript has JIT, but HTML5 works flawlessly and I find that most important.

The maintainer and developer of TenFourFox is apparently a fantastic person, I guess contacting him for clarification wouldn't be a bad thing.

But as far as I know, he does all of his TenFourFox work in XCode, and he leverages Mac OS-only APIs like Core Text and Core Image. I'm not sure how portable that code is.

His main working OS is to this day OS X 10.4.

You can just build the corresponding version of Darwin which is basically OS X without some proprietary apps and without Apple support.

Given it is conserved in the state it was back then providing optimization for powerpc/altivec it might be nice platform to try out.

How much effort it will be to get it going and update hardware drivers is difficult to tell. Surely the newer versions do support more current hardware but they focus on Intel. Meaning some obscure pieces required to run on the power notebook will need to be ported from elsewhere and there might be endian problems with drivers already present because nobody ever built them for bigendian.